“At the end of the war, I would have been happy to murder him,” Eric Lomax told The New York Times in 1995. Lomax was speaking of a Japanese interpreter who had tortured him when he was a prisoner of war during World War II. Lomax, a young British officer in the Royal Corps of Signals, had been captured during the invasion of Singapore in 1942 and forced to march to Changi Prison.
From Changi, he was transferred to Kanchanaburi, Thailand to work on the infamous Burma Railway. Also called the “Death Railway,” this 300-mile line was constructed between Thailand and Burma (now Myanmar) to support the Japanese forces operating there. Nearly 100,000 men died while building the railway, ground down by the grueling work, malnutrition, and disease. Of those 100,000, 12,000 were British, Australian, Dutch and American POWs.
Lomax had little idea of the fate in store for him when he joined the Royal Corps of Signals—a unit in charge of military communications—just before WWII. Prior to joining up at the age of 20, Lomax worked in civil service as both a post office sorting clerk and a telegraphist in Edinburgh, the place of his birth. Once in the Signals, Lomax rose to the rank of second lieutenant.
(L) POW laborers standing in front of the steel bridge over the Mae Klong River (renamed Kwai Yai River in 1960), circa September 1945, in Tamarkan, Thailand. (Public Domain) (R) An edited, cropped portrait of Eric Lomax from the cover of his 2014 edition of “The Railway Man.” Leicester:Charnwood
Facing Torture
After his capture, Lomax’s expertise with communications got him into trouble. The Japanese discovered a radio receiver that Lomax had made out of spare parts, and he was convicted of “anti-Japanese activities.” Brutal beatings, tortures, and interrogations followed the discovery. Lomax was waterboarded and suffered multiple broken bones. One of the torturers, an interpreter named Takashi Nagase, remained particularly fixed in Lomax’s memory.
Australian and Dutch POWs in Thailand, circa 1943, suffering from beriberi (vitamin B/thiamine deficiency). Australian War Memorial, Canberra. Public Domain
Lomax remained in captivity for 3 1/2 years before receiving his freedom at the end of the war. He watched many of his companions die from the inhuman treatment and appalling living conditions. He’d also sustained permanent psychological damage from his own experiences of torture and suffering. In some ways, the torture continued for Lomax—in his mind—long after the war had ended and he returned home. As related in “Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation” by Daniel Phillpott:
“After he returned to his home in Edinburgh in 1945, he married his fiancée and began a career but was traumatized, not yet understanding ‘that there are experiences you can’t walk away from, and that there is no statute of limitations on the effects of torture.’”
He lacked self-worth, couldn’t trust others, and withdrew into himself. “People thought I was coping, but inside I was falling apart,” Lomax wrote.
Lomax spent decades with the psychological scars from torture, a searing hatred for the men who had inflicted those wounds, and an unyielding desire for revenge. Into the 1980s, Lomax fantasized about taking revenge on Nagase.
However, he began healing in 1987 as the first patient of the Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture, in London. The foundation’s director, Helen Bamber, assisted Lomax in coming to terms with what had happened to him.
Still, Lomax yearned to turn the tables on his former captors and inflict pain on them. In his own words, “The idea of revenge was still very much alive in me.”
People in his life told him he needed to forgive his enemies, but Lomax said, “The majority of people who hand out advice about forgiveness have not gone through the sort of experience I had; I was not inclined to forgive, not yet, probably never.”
Facing the Torturer
Lomax eventually learned that Takashi Nagase had survived the war. The stars aligned; his opportunity for revenge had at last arrived. But the accounts he heard of Nagase hinted that this man had also been profoundly affected by his war experiences. Nagase, it was said, had repented of the evil he’d committed in the war, converted to Buddhism, and spent his life doing charitable works, including helping British veterans. Lomax, however, remained skeptical of these claims, believing Nagase’s conversion was insincere. He kept his eyes fixed on revenge.Around this time, Lomax’s second wife, Patti, wrote to Nagase about her husband. The former interrogator replied in a compassionate tone, explaining the change that had taken place within him. Lomax began to believe that Nagase’s change of heart was genuine.
In his own words, Lomax believed “In that moment I lost whatever hard armour I had wrapped around me and began to think the unthinkable: that I could meet Nagase face to face in simple good will. Forgiveness became more than an abstract idea: it was now a real possibility.”
A compilation image with (L) cover of the 2014 edition of Eric Lomax’s book “The Railway Man.” (Leicester : Charnwood) and the cover of “Crosses and Tigers and the Double-Edged Dagger” by Nagase Takashi, 2010. Sheffield: Paulownia Press Ltd
Moreover, Lomax had also read an article describing the profound guilt Nagase felt over the treatment of one particular British POW, and Lomax realized that POW was him.
At last, in 1993, the two former enemies agreed to meet in Kanburi, Thailand, at the River Kwai bridge—part of the railroad that Lomax had himself labored on so many years before.
In his memoir “The Railway Man,” Lomax recounted this surreal meeting, aswirl with so many conflicting emotions:
“From about a hundred yards away I saw him walk out onto the bridge; he could not see me. It was important for me to have this last momentary advantage over him; it prepared me, even now that I no longer wanted to hurt him.”
Finally, Lomax walked out to greet Nagase, who made a formal bow, “his face working and agitated.” Lomax stepped forward, taking the hand of Nagase, whose head barely reached the height of his own shoulder. He said to him in Japanese, “Good morning, Mr. Nagase, how are you?” Nagase, shaking and weeping, said over and over again, “I am so sorry, so very sorry.”
“I had come with no sympathy for this man,” Lomax recalled, “and yet Nagase, through his complete humility, turned this around. In the days that followed we spent a lot of time together, talking and laughing. It transpired that we had much in common.” Lomax realized Nagase was just as broken as he was, though in a different way.
“I could no longer see the point of punishing Nagase by a refusal to reach out and forgive him. What mattered was our relations in the here and now, his obvious regret for what he had done and our mutual need to give our encounter some meaning beyond that of the emptiness of cruelty. It was surely worth salvaging as much as we could from the damage to both our lives.”
Their meeting culminated with Lomax reading a formal letter of forgiveness to Nagase. The two men agreed to remain in contact, and they even became good friends. One of the darkest, bleakest moments in the 20th century yielded to light. It was transfigured into an instance of hope and reconciliation, of reaching out and connecting in a way that transcended the deepest wounds.
After the meeting in Thailand, Lomax was finally able to find resolution and some measure of peace. “Forgiveness is possible,” he wrote. Lomax, who passed away in 2012, recognized that endless cycles of anger and revenge don’t bring healing. As he put it, “Some time, the hating has to stop.”
What arts and culture topics would you like us to cover? Please email ideas or feedback to [email protected]
